


Davesprite: Face the End

by Glitteringworlds



Category: Homestuck
Genre: EoA5 Flash, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-31
Updated: 2011-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-25 02:57:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/270977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glitteringworlds/pseuds/Glitteringworlds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes being saved hurts a lot more than dying ever could.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Davesprite: Face the End

You were always going to be there  
At the end of the world, of a world, because, let’s face it,  
More than one world has ended here  
You were always going to be a casualty, really  
But  
Fuck  
You were never ready for this  
You were never ready  
When she looks at you, and that’s a relative term here, because it’s more like she looks through you, like she looks past you into fucking forever and everything is sunlight in her eyes anyway, you can tell that she’s afraid. Which shouldn’t be a good thing, but it is, here, suspended between the two of you. Because they are all afraid and you’re afraid but it’s different. Four presses close the fear and makes it narrative, makes it archetype and motif and symbolic and it’s meant to be heavy in the heart of heroes, anyway.  
But you’re a bird and you don’t even have legs just this orange wisp like you’re the Littlest Fucking Mermaid and your fear isn’t much more than piss-you-pants fear, than ineptitude, than denial, because there are meteors everywhere and everyone is dead already so you’d think you would have gotten over it already. Mortality, it seems, is just as overrated as you had always expected it to be. You’d lodge a complaint, but screw bureaucracy what you’d really like to do is just throw up your hands and quit, give up on the mortal coil and just go play some video games or something.  
You suppose that’s something like death  
But  
Death is angry and hungry and blood bitter, rusty in your mouth, and you want nothing to do with it.  
The truth is, you should have winked out of existence long ago, but you didn’t. Fear kept you and fear held you and fear is all you have now, fear is all you can share with her, a pathetic offering to a broken god.  
She takes it anyway.  
Hold it close and fall apart, and don’t look back.  
Except you do,  
Of course you do, the both of you,  
Look back and break the spell and lose the gift and  
Fuck  
You’ve always had trouble with fairytales  
So instead you’re afraid and she’s afraid and even that doesn’t feel like much but it’s enough between you, for a moment, to be something like love. Fear in the shape of love, or the other way around, you’re not really sure any more, but who can say it’s not love, who would dare call it anything else, because when death is bearing down you can fall in love in the space of a second.  
Her hands are softer than they should be,  
And trembling.  
You take her hand in yours, palm to palm, her fingers slipping between yours. Or yours between hers. She vibrates against you, and you want to say something, but you don’t. You’re rubbed raw with fear and there aren’t words for this sort of thing.  
You try them out anyway.  
Jade  
Jade we’re about to get hit by Jupiter’s little brother but I just wanted to tell you  
Those dog ears  
Are pretty damn hot  
Ironically speaking  
Jade  
I would have bred  
All the frogs for you  
All of them  
It would have been a frog orgy  
The most beautiful frog orgy of all  
Jade  
I love you  
Like in one of those movies Egbert likes  
Bunnies everywhere  
Nic Cage with his bad accent and everything  
Jade let’s be fucking tangle buddies  
But all you say  
Is Jade, Jade  
Jade,  
I’m scared  
Out of everything, that means the most. Out of everything, this is the truth. More real than grand quests and choices and suns and underlining and capitalizing and flashing green colors. That means more, there, then, to her, than heroes and fate and gods and denizens.  
It’s easy, you think, to be more than yourself. John’s always been good at it. Even Dave, even the other you, the real you, is learning it. They are all figuring it out, bit by bit, death by death.  
The hard part is being worthless, being tired and sore and worn down to nothing. The hard part is being a coward. It’s harder than anything you’ve ever done, waiting there, to be a coward. To face death with the truth that you don’t want to die, that you’d do anything to avoid it, that you can’t  
That you’ll die in fear, that you’ll die in pain.  
That you’ll die with her by your side.  
It’s the hardest, that part, and also the easiest.  
Somehow coward doesn’t feel quite as empty shared between you. Somehow bravery doesn’t seem as important when you realize that it’s something she’s lost too.  
Her hand is in your hand and it’s warm and it’s perfect.  
Her hand is in your hand and it’s all the reason you need to love her.  
All the reason you need to not go gentle into that good night, the fucking Orange Creamsicle of Cowardice, and if that’s the biggest middle finger you can give death, so be it.  
When she begins to change, she looks down at her hands in astonishment. You’re not even sure she realizes what she’s doing when she slips her hand out from yours, unwinds her fingers. It’s instinctual.  
It’s a natural thing to do, really, when one reality is sliding into another and everything is changing and she’s falling apart and shifting and dying and living all at once.  
It’s the first thing John did, you remember, when he first changed.  
And maybe you’d have done the same thing, but  
It still breaks your heart  
When she looks at you now, it’s with a smile,  
And you hate her for it, for the way fear slides right off.  
She is bigger than herself, bigger than the terror that shivered in her voice. Bigger than loneliness and selfishness and sorrow.  
Everything you knew of her  
Is lost in her, is nothing more than pinpoints of light that flash and spark back into the darkness, and her hands are meant for saving lives and shaping space and  
Bigger things, really,  
Than holding yours.


End file.
